Charles Allen obituary
Author of Plain Tales from the Raj, and historian concerned with ’relearning’ the role of orientalists in south Asia
Charles Allen, who has died of cancer aged 80, interviewed the last generation of British administrators of India in 1974 for the BBC radio series Plain Tales from the Raj, which was followed by a bestselling book. While this was his most popular work, his lasting legacy as a historian lies in a series of books about earlier British residents in India, beginning with William Jones in late-18th-century Calcutta (now Kolkata), whose scholarship uncovered the past of the subcontinent, mapped its rivers for the first time, and discovered the common root of Indian and European languages.
Following Plain Tales there were similar broadcasts and books on those who had ruled in Africa and the far east. Charles was concerned that these oral history interviews romanticised the imperialist experience, reinforcing “old colonial attitudes in the 1970s and 1980s”. He went on a process of what he called “relearning” the history of the British encounter with the subcontinent.
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